Today’s gospel is one of those passages that we desperately want to mean something other than what it says.
Matthew’s version of this instruction is actually a little easier than Luke’s. In Luke, Jesus says that anyone who does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, cannot be his disciple. Strong language, to be sure. And for the most part, readers tend to interpret Luke through the lens of Matthew: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” From this it becomes clear that the language of hatred in Luke is really part of an overall picture of love: what is needed is not, exactly, arbitrary love and hatred, but different loves set in order.
But that takes us only so far, because it is one thing to say, in principle, that we should love Jesus more than anyone else, and it is another thing to do it. Nor are we entirely certain what it looks like to love Jesus more than our family . . . because, after all, doesn’t Jesus love our family, too?
Modern American Christians are quite comfortable with the language of sacrifice in this passage. The notion of giving up our lives for some greater good is a deeply admirable thing—and so we speak of sacrifice to family or to country, or to both. This weekend here in the U.S., as we approach Independence Day, we’ll hear lots of good patriotic reminders to be grateful for our history, for those who gave us this country through great personal sacrifice.
I do not wish in any way to belittle such sacrifices, but it is important to observe that in Matthew, Jesus celebrates and beatifies not self-sacrifice in general, but self-sacrifice for his sake. Sacrifice is not a good in itself—otherwise, what would have prevented the early Church, or us, from continuing to offer sacrifices to pagan gods, or to Caesar? Nor is sacrifice an exclusive possession of God, as if I were prohibited from offering half of my sandwich to a hungry friend. Sacrifice, like love, is properly ordered.
This is the difficult part. It won’t work to tell ourselves that sacrifice for the things we love most dearly—whether family or country or any other thing, however good—is the same as sacrifice for the sake of Christ. And if, in our experience, there never seems to be any kind of competition or conflict between sacrifice for Christ and sacrifice for our family or friends or nation, Matthew suggests to us rather strongly that our love may not be what we think it is.
Stanley Hauerwas, an always-provocative theologian, writes, “It is often thought that what Christians believe has become hard to believe because of modern science. But the fundamental challenge to the truthfulness of Christian convictions resides in Christian accommodation to loyalties not determined by Jesus.”
What is at stake here in Matthew 10 is the kind of witness that Christians give to the world—in other words, if what we repeat every week in the Nicene Creed is true, and we really believe it, then this truth should determine the shape of our lives in an unqualified way. To allow other loyalties, however good they may be, to precede our loyalty and devotion to the risen Lord risks not just our own personal relationship with that Lord, but the integrity of the gospel’s proclamation in a sinful and broken world.
What does it look like, in this modern world, to love Jesus above all else? What does it look like to offer our lives so that we may gain them? What kind of sacrifice are we asked to make?
A suburban priest friend once suggested to me in all seriousness that twenty-first-century American martyrdom might be something as simple as refusing to take your kids to a soccer game on Sunday morning. Skipping church isn’t on the same moral level as any number of sins, but it’s exactly such easy slips, which appear to have no consequences, that slowly erode both our loyalty to Christ and the integrity of our witness in the world.
How many other opportunities do we have, on a regular basis, of demonstrating to our families and our neighbors that God is more than an occasional distraction for us? You can talk all you want about loving Jesus, but if everything else—work, family, homework, fishing, vacation, friends—if all of that takes precedence, more often than not, to meeting Jesus, any sensible outside observer would declare, quite accurately, that this Jesus fellow must not be that big of a deal.
One of the things I remember most about my time as a boarding school chaplain is that I got to have conversations about this on a regular basis. Every Sunday, as I left the chapel for lunch around 12:15, I’d run into a kid who’s ambling over to the refectory with the look of someone who’s just rolled out of bed. Mind you, I’m not talking about the fully secular Chinese student or the Muslim student or the Jewish student, but the kind of kid who proudly proclaims a Christian identity, loves serving at the altar on weekdays, and so on. I didn’t see you at church this morning, I’d say. And often the kid would awkwardly look down at the ground and mumble some poor excuse.
At times, I would press him—not to make him feel guilty, but to say, Hey, we really need you. It’s not the same without you. I know you had a lot of homework; I know you had a late night out at Hershey Park; I know you need your sleep. But in the end, you do have to decide whether Jesus is just a swell guy whom you can think about every now and then, when it’s convenient, or whether he is someone to be worshiped, someone to be truly loved. It’s not that you’re going to get struck by lightning if you mess up in your attempt to love Jesus, but relationships take time and commitment and intentional discipline.
Whoever loves sleeping in or taking a vacation more than me is not worthy of me. Whoever loves getting to the golf course early more than me is not worthy of me. Whoever loves getting into the right college or getting the perfect job more than me is not worthy of me.
It’s easy, you might be thinking, for the priest to talk about coming to church, or about making religious devotion and practice the top priority. It’s his job to show up; he doesn’t understand my responsibilities. And it’s true: I don’t. What I understand is that Jesus doesn’t offer us an easy Christianity that’s designed to fit into our schedules. He offers us a challenging, dangerous path of discipleship that could, at any point, lead to death—and if we are so fortunate as to live in an age and a place where physical death is an unlikely consequence of discipleship, let us not imagine that there are no other things in our lives that will have to die when we follow Jesus. Maybe we need to sacrifice our own sense of social comfort for the sake of unveiling the kingdom of God. Maybe we have to sacrifice our identity as helpers in order to really see Jesus in the poor and needy rather than seeing them as potential recipients of our help. Maybe we need to sacrifice some sacred necessity of consumer culture—the college education fund, the bigger TV, the safe neighborhood—not because it will save the world, but because it will show the world, in some small way, that the world has been saved by Jesus Christ.
“Whoever does not take up his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me” (Matt. 10:38).
There’s no clear universal path, no simple formula for sacrifice. But we have to ask this question, over and over: what do we love more than Jesus?
If we have to keep asking this question and keep finding new answers, it only continues to show the world that the gospel is true. Because, in the end, we are not, none of us, “worthy” of Jesus in an absolute sense. We can talk about being in a state of grace. We can talk about merit and the proper disposition to receive the sacrament. But none of that changes the fundamental gap that remains between us and God: we are created. In this basic metaphysical sense, we say, “Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof”—quoting the centurion—“but speak the word only and my soul shall be healed.”
Again, that is not the same as the confession of someone with mortal sin on his soul who dares not approach the sacrament. It is rather the unworthiness intrinsic to our creaturehood, the unworthiness that our Lord, in his incarnation, freely embraced as his own. It is very unlikely that we will in this life cease loving any number of good things more than him. But it’s exactly in receiving what we are unworthy to receive, in this most holy sacrament of the altar, that we are drawn ever deeper into the love of the Lord, trusting that his love will reorder all our loves, and redirect all our sacrifices.